Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Military Culture and Suicide

One of America’s
biggest hidden tragedies is suicide. When I was growing up in the 1950s, it was
a virtually forbidden topic. When I began working as a news reporter in the
1970s, I bumped into a tradition in journalism that suicides were not reported.
When a Vietnam
veteran in a small town I covered as a community news reporter killed himself,
I didn’t know what to do with the information.

Now the lid has burst off an explosive human rights and
public health issue.

“More U.S.
soldiers have killed themselves than have died in the Afghan war,” Time
Magazine noted in a recent front cover special report. The current military
suicide rate is roughly one death per day, Time reported. Meanwhile, military
veterans have been committing suicide at a furious clip, about 18 per day.

How to stop an epidemic of soldiers and veterans killing
themselves in greater numbers than are dying on battlefields has baffled
military leaders and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Despite crises
hotlines and post-traumatic stress counseling programs, instituted in response
to concerns that many soldiers have done multiple deployments in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the U.S. military has clung to its Napoleonic attitude that armies
are trained for killing people, not fostering healthy citizens.

When a young recruit slit his wrists during my Army basic
training at Ft. Jackson, SC in the summer of 1962, a drill sergeant
screamed at our platoon that he would personally provide razor blades to anybody
else who wanted to kill themselves. That hard-boiled attitude didn’t deter
soldiers who decided to end it all. The next year, during my tour in Vietnam, suicide was a leading cause of death
among the U.S.
military expeditionary force—after aircraft crashes and guerrilla warfare
firefights. Suicide continued to be a leading cause of death among Vietnam
veterans for years. But it was long hidden by the lack of publically reported
statistics on suicides by soldiers and veterans.

Despite the rhetoric of concern for the welfare of soldiers
by today’s military leaders, little has changed.

These days, the U.S. military is revealing it has a
very big problem, based on suicide statistics that have skyrocketed in recent
years. At the same time, the Marine Corps is court-martialing a Marine who slit
his wrists in Okinawa—a punitive action that hasn’t put a damper on the rising
rate of suicides, which more than doubled in the Army since 2003 and is heading
upward in all armed services this year.

Nor was the appalling rate of military suicides reversed by
a blistering message from Major General Dana Pittard, a commander at Ft. Bliss,
Texas, who wrote “on his official blog that he was ‘personally fed up’ with
‘absolutely selfish’ troops who kill themselves, leaving him and others to
‘clean up their mess,’” Time Magazine reported.

Despite the towering anger and angst of military commanders,
the suicide rate for veterans is ever higher. A recent state study in Nevada found that “female Nevada
veterans committed suicide at more than triple the overall rate for females
statewide and nearly six times the national rate for females,” KLAS-TV in Las Vegas reported in
March. “Nevada
male veterans had a suicide rate 62 percent higher than the statewide rate for
males and 152 percent higher than the national rate for males.”

However, the CBS-affiliate station’s report added, “No
national statistics exist for veteran suicides, so it is impossible to compare Nevada to other states,
though some studies have estimated that the suicide rate among veterans
nationally is three to four times that of the general population.”

The New York Times dug deeper into national studies of
veterans’ suicides and reported in April that “Preliminary figures suggest that
being a veteran now roughly doubles one’s risk of suicide. For young men ages
17 to 24, being a veteran almost quadruples the risk of suicide, according to a
study in The American Journal of Public Health.”

Government officials speculate that the alarming suicide
rate among veterans in Nevada
is due to the region’s high unemployment. Yet that doesn’t explain why other folks
also facing a grim and long-lasting drought in jobs but didn’t serve in the
military don’t kill themselves at a similarly high rate.

Among the worrisome statistics now available is that the
majority who killed themselves while on active duty were not in combat. This
suggests that U.S.
military culture is a big part of the problem, regardless of where one serves.
The military attitude is that the solution to international disputes is to whip
the troops to continuously train for, supply equipment for, transport and wage
endless war in numerous places around the world. Surely this is depleting the
ability to cope among a great many exhausted soldiers, whose complaints are
ignored.

Wartime military culture drums into soldiers, from cooks and
mechanics to front-line grunts, that the solution to seemingly intractable problems
is to shoot or blow something up and kill somebody. Is it any wonder that so
many soldiers who kill themselves shoot themselves?

According to Time Magazine’s report, the majority of
suicides are committed by enlisted men, whose problems are often attributed by
the military to be personal. In the military hierarchy, enlisted men have little
voice to speak up for themselves. In a case highlighted by Time, however, the
wife of an Army doctor was brushed aside by a military commander when she
sought help for her over-stressed husband—who hung himself in March while on
duty at Trippler Army Medical Center in Honolulu. Now that wife and other
widows and family members are publically telling the stories of their lost loved ones
and pressing for changes in how soldiers and veterans are treated.

The total number of U.S.
military deaths by suicide since 2001 is now more than 2,600—in contrast to
just under 2,000 military fatalities in Afghanistan, Time reported last
week. The news magazine did not break down how many of 4,486 military deaths in
Iraq
were self-inflicted.

Among the stories that should be widely heeded is that of
the death of Army Colonel Theodore Westhusing, who shot himself in June 2005 shortly
before his tour in Iraq was to end, leaving a bitter suicide note addressed to
his commanders.

“I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human right abuses
and liars. I am sullied -- no more,” Westhusing, who was 44 and due to return
to teaching at West Point, wrote. “I didn't
volunteer to support corrupt, money grubbing contractors, nor work for
commanders only interested in themselves. I came to serve honorably and feel
dishonored.” Westhusing’s wife told Army investigators he’d conveyed these
concerns to her, as well. “I think Ted gave his life to let everyone know what
was going on,” she said.

As The Texas Observer noted in an extensive report: “The disillusion that
killed Ted Westhusing is part of the invoice that America will be paying long
after the United States pulls its last troops out of Iraq,” wrote reporter
Robert Bryce. “Some 846 American soldiers died in Iraq in 2005. Of those, 22 were
suicides. Westhusing’s suicide, like nearly every other, leaves the survivors
asking the same questions: Why? And what was it that drove the deceased to such
despair?”

Perhaps Westhusing and many others might still be alive, if the U.S. military provided
a civics course that encouraged soldiers to speak up about troubling experiences
and were attentively listened to in discussing what can be done to improve the
situation.

In the absence of such action, some soldiers, veterans and
family members have been sharing their own stories in public meetings and to
the news media and working on climbing out of black holes of despair through
art and writings about disturbing experiences in the military and since coming
home.

In whatever forum or format, speaking out can be life-saving
for a soldier or veteran in anguish, as well as for the public to understand
what’s going on in our military that’s so devastating.

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About Me

I'm a poet, journalist, author and editor of several books, including A Citizen's Guide to Grassroots Campaigns, Earth Songs: New and Selected Poems, and Winning Hearts & Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans. I also teach writing workshops and college journalism courses. For more information: www.janbarry.net.